I was fortunate enough to interview director Curtis Harrington for Filmfax a few years before his death in 2007, and now that Dennis Hopper has left us as well, I thought I’d share some of Harrington’s recollections on their best-known collaboration. His feature-film directorial debut, Night Tide (1961), marked one of Hopper’s first leading roles. Harrington also directed Hopper in Queen of Blood (1966), cannibalized from a Soviet SF film acquired by Roger Corman, and both men acted in the unfinished Orson Welles film The Other Side of the Wind.
“I was very passionate to get on and establish myself as a director of feature films,” Harrington related, “and after writing the [unpublished] story [“The Secrets of the Sea”] when I was in Europe in the early ’50s, I came back to Los Angeles. I was thinking, ‘What would be a good subject?’ I thought of my story and I began to turn it into a screenplay. Nobody ever published any of my short stories. I wrote quite a few in that period….I put it together with the help of Roger Corman. And I knew, obviously, I couldn’t start out by making a high-budget picture, so I was perfectly happy to be making a film [on a shoestring]…. I think it came about because I submitted the script of Night Tide to his company [The Filmgroup]; that’s probably how it happened. He passed on it, because it was too artistic from his point of view, but he said, ‘I’ll help you raise the financing for it,’ and he did.
“I had a lot of silly experiences trying to raise the money. One person introduced me to some members of the Mafia, and then I met a very eccentric man who had helped finance some low-budget movies, so it was quite an adventure…. We shot the film non-union, and the union was still very, very rigorous in their oversight. You know, you had to have what they called the IATSE ‘bug’ on the film, or projectionists in theaters would refuse to run it. The way we got around that, we couldn’t afford the price of a union cinematographer–Vilis Lapenieks was a maverick, an independent–and so Vilis Lapenieks did about eighty percent of the film. Then we got in [Corman’s longtime cinematographer] Floyd Crosby to do just a few days’ work on the film, and thereby we got the bug.
“[Supporting player Cameron] was very involved in the occult, and she was a marvelous painter, a very striking personality. I decided first of all to make a short film celebrating her personality and her work, called The Wormwood Star [1956]. And then, when I came to make Night Tide, I decided that her own aura of mystery and so on would make her perfect–even though she was not an actress–to play the mysterious woman in black, so I asked her to do it and she did it. But my interest in her was primarily as an admirer of her paintings, and I own one of them. She was a striking figure, onscreen and in real life. There’s a book where she’s mentioned quite often that came out recently, called Sex and Rockets. It’s all about her and her husband in the late ’40s, who blew himself up. He was a rocket scientist at Cal Tech, and some experiment or something went bad, and he blew himself up with explosives, before I ever met her.
“[Hopper] went out and got drunk on the last day of shooting, and we couldn’t finish the film [right away]. I found out later that that’s very common. Julie Harris told me a story that fit with that about East of Eden [1955], when they had their [wrap] party, and she said she went to [Hopper’s sometime co-star] James Dean’s dressing room because he didn’t seem to be at the party, and she heard terrible sobs coming from within the dressing room. She knocked on the door and he came to the door with tears streaming down his face and he said, ‘What am I going to do? It’s all over.’ It’s hard to explain, but psychologically, actors live through their work, and a film is kind of a hothouse atmosphere that lasts a certain length of time and gives them a whole life during that time, and then it’s all over, so it’s quite understandable. It would be like ‘the blues,’ after all the excitement and everything. It’s all over, and they don’t like to give that up, psychologically, and that was true of Dennis. So he was a perfect angel during the whole production, but the last day of shooting he went out and got drunk at lunch, so we were unable to finish the film [until the postponed shots could be completed later]. He didn’t do it consciously; that was an unconscious thing.
“I don’t remember how I met [composer David Raksin] originally, but I showed him the film, just on the off chance I might get him to agree to do the score, and he said he would love to do it. Again, there was no money–you just could barely scrape enough money together to have a small orchestral group play it under his direction, but I think his contribution is major to the film…. It never got much distribution. AIP put it out on a double bill, but at that time there was no market for sort of independent films. It was still the period of double features. There was a low-budget film and a high-budget film, and they all went out in tandem, and that’s the way it was released. I think it played in a lot of theaters accompanying [Richard Matheson’s] The Raven [1963], one of the Corman movies…. [But] Dennis is very, very proud of the film. They often do retrospectives of Dennis Hopper’s work at film festivals and art museums and so on around the world, and he invariably insists that they include Night Tide.”
Excellent article – thank you again.
Presume you’re referring to the conclusion of the Lee piece, but you’re welcome in any case. 🙂
I did mean “Harrington on Hopper” – and I am really quite taken by “Tigon, Tigon, burning bright”.
Thank YOU again.
Golly, it seems I’ve found a fan…and a celebrity one at that! Apologies for the incorrect assumption.